Avast Free Antivirus Review 2017

Avast Free Antivirus Review 2017.Most free antivirus programs don’t offer much besides basic malware protection, but Avast Free Antivirus is a half-step toward being a full-fledged security suite, with many features you’d normally be charged for. It has not only a password manager and a local-network security scanner, but gives you lots of configuration options.

Yet while it didn’t sap much of our computer’s performance, Avast Free Antivirus took a long time to scan, and its malware protection could be better.

Antivirus Protection

Avast Free Antivirus matches new files with a continually updated database of malware signatures. Anything that slips through is subject to behavioral monitoring that looks for telltale signs of malicious activity. If new malware is found on your machine, you can opt to upload it to Avast’s servers for further analysis.

Avast Free Antivirus screens out malicious email attachments and rogue web pages — which some other free antivirus products don’t do — and offers a dizzying range of customization options for each feature. However, it doesn’t scan online repositories of files for threats. It offers full and quick system scans, the former of which can be scheduled.

The software uses its Smart Scan feature to look for dodgy browser add-ons, weak passwords, compatibility problems, outdated software, network threats and performance issues. You can’t fix performance problems, however, without subscribing to the company’s Cleanup product for $23.88 a year.
You can use Avast Free Antivirus to scan any single drive, folder or file by locating the item with Windows Explorer or File Explorer, then selecting and right-clicking the item. But Avast won’t automatically scan a USB thumb drive when it’s plugged in.

Antivirus Performance
Avast Free Antivirus was better at catching malware than Microsoft’s Windows Defender or Security Essentials, but paled next to the more effective malware shields of the other free Windows antivirus products we reviewed.
In Windows 10 evaluations conducted by the independent German lab AV-TEST, Avast Free Antivirus caught 98.8 percent of previously unseen, or “zero-day,” malware in September 2015, and 96.7 percent in October. Yet AVG, Avira and Bitdefender each stopped 100 percent in each month.

Avast did better against widespread, previously recognized, malware, stopping 99.8 percent in September and 99.3 percent in October. But all the other free products we recently reviewed, aside from Microsoft’s Windows Defender, caught either 99.9 or 100 percent.
In AV-TEST’s Windows 8.1 evaluations, Avast Free Antivirus had more success against zero-day malware, stopping 100 percent in November 2015 and 98.3 percent in December. Against widespread malware, it was 99.8 percent effective in each month. That’s not bad, but Avira and Bitdefender did better in both categories. Avast scored two false positives — benign software mistakenly flagged as malware — in November, and one in December.

On Windows 7, Avast Free Antivirus did acceptably well in AV-TEST’s most recent round, stopping 98.2 percent of zero-day malware in January 2016, and 98.1 percent in February. Every other brand we recently reviewed did better, except Microsoft.
Against widespread malware, Microsoft Security Essentials — Windows Defender’s older sibling — caught up to Avast. Both it and Avast stopped 99.7 percent in January, but in February, Microsoft edged ahead, with 99.6 percent to Avast’s 99.3 percent. Avast scored three false positives over both months.

Avast’s scores here are not bad. AV-TEST evaluates more than 20 antivirus brands at once, and Avast consistently ranks above average. It gets a solid B in malware protection, while the other four non-Microsoft products we reviewed in this round — Avira, AVG, Bitdefender and Panda — just happen to range from A- to A+.
In tests by a different lab, AV-Comparatives in Austria, Avast Free Antivirus stopped 99.4 percent of “real-world” (mostly web-based) malware in November 2015, and 98.8 percent in December. That’s not bad, but Avira, Bitdefender and Panda were a length ahead. Avast had one false positive in November and six in December, which sounds bad until you see Panda’s total of 23, and Microsoft’s total of 52.

Security and Privacy Features

Like most free antivirus products, Avast Free Antivirus has no sandbox to dry-run suspect software. But it does have a password manager, which you won’t find in most free AV software, a secure web browser for banking and shopping, and a game mode for interruption-free play.

The secure browser, called SafeZone, is based on Google’s open-source Chromium browser, but we weren’t able to add Chrome extensions. That’s a good thing, as every extension is a security risk. We were able to take screenshots, however, which the competing free SafePay secure browser from Bitdefender won’t let you do. That’s not necessarily a good thing.

Avast Free Antivirus has everything you need to create an emergency rescue disk, except the USB thumb drive or blank DVD, that is. Most other free AV products make you download a program for this potentially PC-saving task.

Performance and System Impact
Avast Free Antivirus’ impact on system performance was excellent, as long as you don’t mind long scan times.
Without actively scanning, Avast let our OpenOffice benchmark test, which matches 20,000 names to an equal number of addresses on a spreadsheet, complete in 6 minutes and 56 seconds. That’s just three seconds longer than the baseline time (set before any third-party AV software was installed) and indicates a passive system slowdown of only 0.7 percent.

During a full scan, the OpenOffice benchmark finished in 7:07, a lag of only 14 seconds, or 3.3 percent, from the baseline. That’s better than all the other products we tested, whose full-scan system impacts ranged from 5.1 percent (Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition) to 55 percent (AVG AntiVirus Free). In fact, it’s not much heavier than AVG’s passive impact of 2.7 percent.

Avast Free Antivirus goes beyond what’s expected of a free antivirus program by including a password manager and a home-network scanner. It has a barely noticeable system impact, and lets you make deep changes to how it operates. Yet the software can take a long time to fully scan a system, and doesn’t offer the greatest malware protection. Still, Avast Free is good for those who want extra features with antivirus software, but don’t want to pay for them.